It took Jurgen Klopp a year or so to figure out just how tough and grueling English football campaigns are. After a week in which Liverpool crashed out of the Champions League and then lost the Carabao Cup final, Arne Slot now knows it too.
Up until this point, it had been pretty much smooth sailing for the 46-year-old. Sure, his side had suffered a shock loss to Plymouth Argyle, but there were bigger prizes to play for.
Liverpool is going to win the Premier League this season and the significance of that — not least in the Dutchman’s first season in charge — should not be underplayed. The Reds do look leggy, though, and come the summer, the roster he has to play with will need to be improved.
“This game had nothing to do with running,” Slot insisted during his post-game press conference at Wembley. “It had to do with duels. We had no intensity. We could not press them. They played over our press and every time got it into our last line.”
But that still means the bottom line is energy. Liverpool simply didn’t have enough of it, while Newcastle United found more with every goal, clearance and rare narrow escape.
There were several contrasts between the two sets of players but it was perhaps summed up best in the center of the field. Ryan Gravenberch, Alexis Mac Allister and Dominik Szoboszlai looked jaded and lacked the power to win their battles; Joelinton, Bruno Guimaraes and Sandro Tonali, meanwhile, were exceptional.
Liverpool has not often trusted Wataru Endo to play more than a cameo this season while Harvey Elliott, who limped off with an injury, hasn’t featured as much as he might have liked. Slot doesn’t like rotation but there is a strong argument that had he done a bit more of it, some players might now look fresher.
The flip side of that, he might argue, is that Liverpool might not have such a buffer in the Premier League table had that been the case. It would have been risky to take Gravenberch out of the team at certain points given how central he has been this season and had Liverpool dropped points, Slot would have been criticized for doing so.
That, though, is why more quality is needed ahead of next season. It is fine for Slot to believe Endo can only play the “seeing the game out” role in most fixtures (the earlier rounds of the domestic cups being the exception) but then Liverpool needs to find an understudy who can share the load.
Likewise, it needs more options who can score regularly in the final third of the field when Mohamed Salah is struggling. On this occasion, Luis Diaz and Diogo Jota were stifled too. Federico Chiesa has never really been fully trusted, Darwin Nunez didn’t make any impact, and Cody Gakpo is still coming back from injury.
Slot knows now that more rotation is required when there are so many games and they are so intense. Liverpool needs to ensure that he has enough quality options to allow that to happen.
